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For those who don't remember the Abortion debate in the 80s , it was a lot like Gw. Both sides really intense. Finally you just learned not to bring it up. Both sides too strongly belief in their own POV, no possibility of rational debate. Sex, religion, politics - not possible to discuss in public

It's a little different from abortion, because everyone agrees on the physical processes involved. Same for gun control, Iraq and Afghanistan, and other hot-button issues. The arguments on climate involve fundamental disagreements about what's actually happening, not just whether certain things should happen or not. When new data can help clarify the "what's happening" issue, it's absurd to say we shouldn't bring it up because some people might get offended.

Responding to my own post to clarify: I should have said "... everyone agrees on the physical processes involved in pregnancy" above. As opposed to IOW, unless you believe that a fetus gains a soul at a certain point between conception and birth, there's broad agreement about what happens during those nine months; the argument is over what we should do about it. With climate change, you have a large group of people involved in the argument who deny that it's happening at all, and another large group wh

This isn't anti-abortion vs pro-choice - this is "babies come from storks" vs "babies come from sex", and the story with the storks keeps on winning because people don't want to face the fact that if you have a lot of unprotected sex, you're going to end up with babies.

carbon gases, humans adding up to it, will make everything worse. its one thing to have to build huge dams and sets in order to save london, netherlands etc from sinking, and its another to have the sea levels rise higher than we can prevent with building dams or sets, due to exacerbating the situation through our pollution.

i assure you, those who are opposing the measures will not be there, to spend money to save anything, when the time comes. its better to ignore them entirely now, rather than having to blame them and not being able to find them anywhere when the clock hits the hour.

Plus we won't have to worry about Florida land scams - it will ALL be swampland. And every homeowner will be underwater, so no need for a bail-out. Just attach huge inner tubes and let the hurricanes float your abode to a new state.

The study, to be published in the Jan. 9 Advanced Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first full climate model simulation to make predictions out to 1000 years from now. It is based on best-case, 'zero-emissions' scenarios constructed by a team of researchers from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (an Environment Canada research lab at the University of Victoria) and the University of Calgary.

The Northern Hemisphere fares better than the south in the computer simulations, with patterns of climate change reversing within the 1000-year time frame in places like Canada.

That's a pretty good model.

Who cares about 30 years of data when they can forecast out 1000 years!

Looks to me that after we drown because of rising sea levels then the sea level will go back down. Darn - and I want some ocean front property. Maybe this will drive the price down. Maybe it will drive the price up. Maybe can we use the model on the stock market? I hate to admit that probably some of my tax money funded this.

Why Doesn't Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?

Typical of the commentaries on sea ice is this by Harold Ambler, published, of all places, in the Huffington Post, on January 3, 2009:

P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the "terrible," "unprecedented" melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007...

So, to answer Ambler's final question:

Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too.

The answer is simple. The Arctic decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101. Ambler is flat out wrong. Not all trends are equally statistically significant.

What the last two (2) maps don't indicate is if warmer ocean temperatures increase precipitation inland.

Since we are still waiting for a very anemic solar cycle#24 to build up sunspots, I think perhaps we should wait till past 2015 because it seems the great solar science experiment in the sky is already underway.

"Melting in 2010 started exceptionally early at the end of April and ended quite late in mid- September," Tedesco said in a statement. "This past melt season was exceptional, with melting in some areas stretching up to 50 days longer than average."

It so happens that this correlates with the volcano eruptions [wikipedia.org] in Iceland which were particularly intense in mid to late April. Looking at the map of the ashfall [wikipedia.org], it appears that the southern tip of Greenland got a heavy dose of ash and it's likely (IMHO, of course) that the rest of Greenland got at least a dusting. My take is that ash, despite its typically light color, absorbs more sunlight than ice and snow does. So is it a coincidence that the albedo of Greenland collectively changed in a way that absorbed more sunlight at the same time that increased melting was observed?

Mod parent up - the rest of the paragraph that the GP's quote was lifted from shows a very acceptable understanding of what random means. The GP is just looking for some excuse to discredit scientists who mention anything even peripherally related to global warming.

Because discrediting AGW isn't politically motivated? You know, I always find it funny when people believe that there is more political motivation to push AGW than to discredit it, as if the large number of filthy rich corporations who would lose from green measures had neither the motivation nor the means to buy scientists and politicians to slow down and muddle the debate. Yet, somehow, Al Gore and his following of tree-loving hippies can do it?

Climate change wasn't political until it got recognized and lumped in with other environmental issues by people with vested interests, such as the oil industry, who are harmed by attempts to rein in practices that harm the environment. What do you suppose is the vested interest that would cause someone to fraudulently support the idea that global warming is a problem?

So, assuming that you're accusing James Hansen of fraudulently exaggerating the risk of climate change, what do you say was his motivation to be fraudulent?

As an aside, debating about whether carbon dioxide contributes to global warming is partially irrelevant: the excess carbon comes from burning fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even if there's no associated environmental damage, we should be looking for sustainable alternatives anyway. Sunlight is the only thing that isn't going to run out in the long term (for some definition of long term).

What I disagree with - and in this I'm in agreement with one of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore - is that CO2 is in any way harmful to the environment. And that as a consequence of this obsessing over a few tenths of a degree increase in temperature, we're spending huge sums of money on things that are likely to make absolutely no difference whatsoever, ignoring all of the other problems that we really need to be dealing with.

CO2 is harmful in the sense that we started having more of it in the pa

Since when is 3 degrees C a few tenths? And really, the issue isn't environmental damage, per se, it's environmental change that we're worried about. Although environmental change will certainly cause damage in many discrete ways. But if you don't think the melting of the polar ice caps is going to have a substantial effect, you're deluding yourself.

And I don't know how you can say that CO2 is not harmful to the environment in any way. That is simply not true, no matter what some guy who founded Greenpeace says. Increased CO2 in the oceans is causing ocean acidification, which is damaging many types of ocean life, particularly coral reefs.

The bigger mistake by GP is to not understand the word "distributed" in statistics. It doesn't mean "how far apart" like in common usage. If you deny climate change, you believe there is equal probability for each year to be picked as an outlier year, a uniform distribution (or as he says it, evenly distributed).

Given the values one can calculate a confidence level that it is NOT evenly distributed. Presumably that's what the researcher did, I've never known journalists to publish confidence levels.

If you deny climate change, you believe there is equal probability for each year to be picked as an outlier year, a uniform distribution (or as he says it, evenly distributed).

This keeps coming up. You do know that there's correlation between the climate of sequential years. You can't, even in the absence of global warming or other climate change, treat climate data as a sequence of independent random events.

How can you be so sure that there is little we can do to stop it? The fact that we can't prove that we're responsible for global warming doesn't prove that we're not. And if you do a proper risk assessment, like this guy [youtube.com] does in his series of videos that are very much worth viewing despite his silly hats, you'll find that the smart thing to do is to try and do something about it.

Your line of thought sounds like "the Earth is going to hell but we might not be responsible so let's just see where this goes". Consider the possibility that we are responsible, and/or (they don't even have to be connected) the possibility that we can do something about it.

Actually, at this point there isn't anything that we can do realistically to reverse the warming. Even if we stopped dumping CO2 into the atmosphere now, the planet would continue to warm.

To reverse the warming, we would need to somehow get the CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it. The problem is it would take a lot of energy to do and massive world wide participation. With most of the world still being powered by fossil fuels this is unlikely to work, not to mention the costs would be prohibitive to

If only that were true. The amount we globally spend on defense is probably much, much more, and may even actually be on the order of magnitude required to feed and clothe Africa. Irrespective of global warming, our prosperity is completely based on cheap energy, so it's obviously prudent to look for alternative sources for it. Coincidentally, this happens to also be the issue at the heart of the global warming problem. A plan to simply extract and burn oil until it runs out isn't a sustainable plan by any stretch, whether or not you care about global warming.

A plan to simply extract and burn oil until it runs out isn't a sustainable plan by any stretch, whether or not you care about global warming.

Actually it is. It's not a tap that will suddenly turn off. It will get more and more expensive per barrel until it is simply undercut by other technologies. I'm not a big environmentalist, but I have a solar panel array and am planning for my next vehicle to be completely EV (not hybrid). Not because I think I'm making a difference for the planet, but because over a ten year period it will more than pay for itself.

I love how some people can be so determined in saying humanity has hardly any impact on our planet. Consider the changes in human lifestyle over the last 100 years. Consider population growth. Consider consumption or natural resources. Consider how much of the Earth is changed by human development. Consider the combined effect of those, and then tell me it's a good idea to keep doing what we're doing.

It feels to me like some people are giving in to the fact that we did in fact evolve from monkeys, and they'

There is no empirical data showing that Co2 caused an increase in 20th century temperature. There is a weak correlation between Co2 and temperature in the 20th century. There is a stronger correlation between the PDO and solar activity. But you will ignore the latter, because the former suits your political opinions better.

We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.

Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph [wikipedia.org] where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.

You obviously know little of earth history. The work of Peter Ward and associates on fossil extinction periods make it clear that carbon dioxide increases are directly associated previous mass extinction events, except one at the end of the Cretaceous, which was associated with a bolide impact. In all other cases the world warmed dramatically from venting of carbon dioxide by extensive episodes of shield vulcanism and formation of plate basalts, stimulating dramatic growth of hydrogen sulfide producing ba

I believe in significant anthropogenic contributions to climate change, but I am far from certain we can turn back the clock. We ought to take the notion that the world is heading towards a new climate equilibrium no matter what we do as a serious possibility.

That doesn't mean we should give up on greenhouse emissions because there's a big difference between getting there in,say fifty years vs eighty or a hundred.

This is not the kind of thing we can know with the kind of certainty we'd like. Somebody with s

CO2 and methane are gasses that prevent thermal energy from escaping into spaceThe CO2 and methane levels have been risingHuman activity generates CO2 and methane

Thus, there's nothing we can do about it?

Yeah; that sounds about right. We're pretty good at raiding and using resources, but in general we don't give a damn about the waste products of our depredations. Much like most other species, except that we have the intelligence to understand what we're doing. But we don't have the intelligence (or social capabilities) to organize the solutions to the problems that we cause.

History is full of examples of this sort of failures. Thus, historians and archaeologists tell us that the "Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East was a major agricultural land 3000 years ago. The people who built the irrigation systems back then understood how salinification worked. They knew that you have to slightly over-water the land to prevent salt buildups. But in the short term, it was more profitable to maximize the land that was irrigated by using the minimum water required by the crops. The result is the devastated, barren landscape that we see over most of that area now. It was done knowingly, and the humans who did it couldn't organize to stop the process (though they could organize to engage in major wars).

Back in the 1970s and 80s, some researchers did an interesting experiment in that area: They leased a few dozen 2-3 square km plots scattered around the landscape, built goat-proof fences around them, and sat back to watch what happened. A year later, they reported that all these small protected areas were covered with grasses and other herbaceous plants. They suggested that if the grazing animals could be kept penned up for a year, there would be no more deserts in southwest Asia. Did the governments jump on this and eradicate their deserts? You all know the answer to that; you can see it every day in news photos from the area. There's no way humans will ever organize to do that, even when they know the story. (Also, most of the literature is in French, which limits its availability to most of us.;-)

More recently (and close to home here in the US), back in the 1990s the Corps of Engineers did a series of studies on the levee system in the Mississippi delta. They also did a major simulation (google for "Hurricane Pam") of the effect of a major hurricane on New Orleans. Their reports listed all the points of failure that in fact failed when Katrina hit. Their requests for funding to repair and reinforce the levees were turned down by Congress. Then Katrina hit, and people pretended it was an Act of God. But in fact, they knew in great detail exactly what would happen, and it did happen. They couldn't organize to do what was easily within our abilities to prevent the disaster that they knew was coming.

This is human nature. Oil, coal, and natural gas are resources that we can organize to exploit. The side effects of burning all those hydrocarbons is something that we can't organize to control, even when we understand it. All we an do is debate the issue until the disaster is upon us. And, as in the above examples, it'll be too late then to do what we could have done to prevent what we knew was coming.

Actually, in the salinification/desertification example, it's not too late. It can be done any time, and on any scale from a few square km up. But we can't and won't do it on a large scale. Research proceeds on a small scale. Google for "bocage" plus other agriculture-related terms. The information is there, but it's mostly academic, with no local governments getting involved in solving the problem. And note the two meanings of that word "academic", which explains a lot about our attitude toward big problems that we can't organize to solve.

Yes and if you look at the temperature, which you "know" from the same sources, you will see very clearly that today's temperature is cold compared to the historical average. Not only that, you'll discover that the level of variability we are experiencing now is no different to the level of variability expressed in the historical or geological record. So please, remind me why certain activists are running around screaming that civilisation is going to end, and people like you are nodding in agreement?

Everything depends on the timescale. For the past 2,000 years that we started settling places as a civilization, we're reaching record warmth. It doesn't matter what happened 1-500M years ago, as those conditions existed when the human race didn't. There is a reason why sea to land transition fossil hunters are going to Northern Canada for fossils: about 365M years ago that area was tropical.

The speed of change that's happening is staggering, it's at least a hundred times faster than the speed of natural, geological changes. The difference between our current changes to the composition of the atmosphere and thus the planet's surface temperature and the geological changes is like the difference between bumping into someone and running that person over at over 100MPH.

The really idiotic thing about people who argue that "it was warmer millions of years ago" is that it is completely irrelvant.

Scientifically, you cannot compare today's climate with that of millions of years ago. The Earth was fundamentally different. Land masses were in different configurations. The atmospheric contents were different. The volcanic activity was different. The ocean currents were different. Even the amount of solar irradiance was different. So from a scientific standpoint, comparing todays

The name was given to Greenland by Eric the Red as a marketing exercise to get people to emigrate there. When they arrived they did not find it green as the name would suggest. Some parts of it were greener than they are now, but on the whole it was a very inhospitable place.

Totally correct, according to the really longterm data. And the "rate of change" is actually in line with that.

It also occurs to me to wonder... what would be so BAD about another "Medieval Warm Period", making *practical* arable and habitable places like the Greenland coast, central Canada, and parts of Siberia? Yeah, you might sacrifice a relatively smaller area elsewhere as desert, but wouldn't it be a net gain for human habitability?

As to species preservation, all well and good, but species come and go

What would be so bad about another midieval warm period? You seem not to have made the connection between temperature and the spread of disease. Perhaps we must all wait until malaria and a host of other tropical diseases is endemic to Chicago, then perhaps the slow and poorly educated will begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.

As species do come and go, but normally over thousands and millions of years, not hundreds. When world fisheries disappear and when agriculture collapses (you need mor

Well, at least in practical terms we won't -- what we will do is endlessly argue about it and make excuses.:-/

The key to American behavior is Florida. As long as Florida is above water, any money spent fighting global warming will be considered wasted. The day Disney World has to close permanently due to perpetual flooding, global warming will become Public Enemy #1 and no expense will be spared to stop it. (Of course, by that point it will likely be too late, so all the money thrown at the problem then will in fact be wasted... and thus the prophecy fulfills itself)

What absolute rubbish from yet another climate scientist who fails to understand random numbers. Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers - especially over such a small sample size. It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.

Of course it's possible -- that's called "the null hypothesis." The rather more interesting question is, "how likely is it?"

If I roll "6" ten times straight, the dice might not be loaded. After all, the odds of doing so (allowing the first time free, since it had to be something) are one in a mere 6^9 -- one in ten million. One in ten million events happen all the time (especially on Star Trek) and if you're a betting man by all means put your money on them and I'll match you on the other side.

You really don't understand statistics at all do you? You are exactly right that, after rolling a 6, the chance of getting a 6 on the next roll is 1 in 6, and on the next it's 1 in 6, and then 1 in 6 on the next and so on. We really do understand that. What you don't seem to grasp is that still means that the odds of getting 6 6 times in a row are 1 in 46656. The odds are the same for any particular sequence. The odds of getting 5 six times in a row are the same. The odds of getting 1,2,3,4,5,6 are the same

Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim. That does not tell us what caused the trend, and for all we know, it might be a normal, natural fluctuation that will reverse itself soon. Also, the record years do seem to be evenly distributed in the past 15 years, so I'm a tad puzzled. But come on, 30 data points are enough to see *some* trends, and here we can see a clear ju

While I don't have a clue on whether his data is true or not, it certainly concerns me that someone who makes such unfounded statements is doing this research in the same way I would be concerned about a paramedic performing a neurosurgical procedure.

Personally I think the guy should be congratulated for trying to communicate some pretty complex stuff to a lay audience. The research paper looks fine, it is where the work is documented, and that is where credibility will be decided. If you want to criticise the science or the scientist go review the paper and then say something a little more substantive.

30 years is too short a period to be drawing conclusions. Looking at all of the current interglacial--back 10,000 years--makes more sense: http://smpro.ca/crunch/GISP2Civil.png [smpro.ca]

On that scale, these guys' record years are chump change. If the Mann Hockey Stick is an indicator that we're leaving the current cold spell and going back to normal temperatures, we can expect lots of "record years" for the next 200-500 years before it turns around again.

30 years is too short a period to be drawing conclusions. Looking at all of the current interglacial--back 10,000 years--makes more sense: http://smpro.ca/crunch/GISP2Civil.png [smpro.ca]

Let me state quite clearly: it is not a question of taste or opinion what constitutes a too short period for drawing conclusions, it is a question of statistical significance and the level of acceptable certainty. The shortest time interval for statistically significant warming at p < 0.05 is about 15 years. The precise shortest time period depends on the given years of course. We're seeing statistically significant warming since 1996 for example.

The graph you linked is a local temperature measurement, it isn't the global average. For a much better overview please click here [wikimedia.org]. Consider the fact though, that even though we had higher temperatures a couple of million years ago, we haven't had a civilization back then.

Having walked my dogs in -20C weather this morning, it can't get warmer fast enough.

It might get even colder locally for you, if for example an oceanic current starts moving away from it's current path by a couple of hundred miles. By the way, the recent cold spell was the consequence of artic cold air being pushed down to Northern America and Europe while the Arctic warmed to unusually high temperatures. This might in fact happen a lot more often in the future.

It's a climate scientist dumbing statistics down for the International Business Times.

Instead of all this qualitative bullshitting and clear lack of understanding of statistics (500k data points?), you should have made a quantitative statistical argument. If you have a 30-year period and random variability (such that any year is equally likely to be the Nth hottest), what is the probability that a 12-year span contains the 5 hottest years?

You qualitatively make it sound like the probability is high. "That's just how random numbers work."

I figure it to be about 0.5%.

That means that it's very likely that it's not simply random variability.

It could be the same number every year for 5 years in a row and still be random, just like you can throw "6" several times in a row with dice and it does not mean that the dice are loaded.

The odds of throwing 6 twice in a row in an honest dice are 1 in 36. The odds of throwing it thrice in a row are 1 in 216. The series continues 1 in 1296, 1 in 7776, 1 in 46 656, 1 in 279 936 and 1 in 1 679 616. At some point the reasonable conclusion chances from "mere coincidence" to "loaded dice"; and as this example shows, sometimes mere 8 data points are sufficient to establish this.

It's all very good to observe this process but since there is little we can do to stop it, at least we should make an effort to observe and document it properly to see if someone can come up with a plausible, reproducible explanation for it.

"Increasing amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere trap heat, which causes ice to melt" is a plausible explanation. No explanation is repeatable, unless you happen to have a spare Earth somewhere.

Putting alarmist, or worse, rabid green "spin" on it is only going to discredit the research in the long run.

In the last 100 years, Tokyo has sank relative to the sea by 19 feet. Has anyone noticed?

Actually, the opposite effect has happened in Scandinavia. There, they've long had the problem that the land is still rebounding from the loss of the glaciers, and has been rising at the rate of about a meter per century in recent centuries. This means that seaports (which is where most of the people live) have to migrate downhill over time. There are archaeological sites 5, 10 or 20 km from the shore that were active ports 400 or 1000 years ago. But in the last half century, this rising has slowed down due to the rising sea level.

So far, this hasn't fully compensated for the loss of established ports; it has merely slowed the process a bit. But Scandinavians are looking forward to their shoreline being much more stable over the next century or two, and the sea rise accelerates.

Some parts of the world will benefit from the change. Some parts have already benefited. But it's not clear that this makes up for the problems caused at lower latitudes (and altitudes).

Not really. Many goods have a density higher than that of seawater. The addition of extra fresh water from melting ice caps will help reduce the density of seawater. This will increase the range of products that can be thrown overboard to be delivered to underwater wastelands.

Also, higher sea levels will make it easier for bigger ships to sail right into the heart of sunken cities. This will further increase the efficiency of shipping, and reduce the need for secondary transport systems.

There are places in Europe below sea level. Dams and dikes are a practical solution. Building them around our coasts would create jobs. I never understood this whole "OMG we'll flood the coasts" screaming. If this is an issue then start lobbying Washington for funds to build dams.

That worked really awesomely in New Orleans.

And of course it's an entirely free proposition, that's dirt cheap, doesn't require reengineering ports, closing beaches with the resulting loss of tourism or anything like that. The US fortunately has a smoothly running system as shown by the exemplary mantenance records of the New Orleans levees.

And BTW, we did not have a problem resettling all the people from New Orleans on very short notice. Resettling the coasts would take years and is entirely doable on that time scale.The main questions are whether we expect sea levels to continue rising, the time scale and the cheapest way to deal with it.

Thank you sir for pointing out these points. People don't realize that the Earth is been around for millions of years and just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it.

Conversely, just because things have been going on for millions of years, doesn't mean we can't screw things up much faster. Our ability to do so became much larger in modern times.

The earth will be here weather we on it or not. Life will live on just as it did without us.

The earth, or life in a general sense continuing to exist is pretty much a given unless we manage to blow it up into space dust, DBZ style. But nobody is worrying about that, AFAIK.

What worries me is that I want myself, my children if I ever have any, familiy, friends, their decendants and so on to be able to live and do so reasonably comfortably. Yeah, humanity in general can adapt and survive events like the flooding of all coastal cities even. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a big deal. No, it'd be a huge horrible mess with world-wide consequences, so I really hope we don't have to see it happen.

A very good point. For example, just because a mountain that has been around for millions of years disappears doesn't mean that we caused it. Mountaintop removal mining means, however, that these days it's more likely than not.

It seems to me that anthropogenic climate change deniers always start with "you can't prove climate is changing" then when you do, they fall back on "you can't prove that humans are causing it" and finally on "it'll be a good thing anyway with the better weather up North, etc.". Then they reset back to the first position any time new evidence comes out. It seems to me to be mostly hiding their heads in the sand and denying the possibility that humans could affect the environment in any way, all of human history to the contrary. Frankly, there's no way all of the things we're releasing into the atmosphere the soil and the water can't have an effect. Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans. We are definitely having an effect with all the pollution we're spewing out. The environment may have massive reserves, but it's not operating on a scale that much greater than us and we can overwhelm those reserves. The evidence is overwhelming. The environment, and probably even the human race will survive, of course, but in the same way it always does: with massive die-offs and then recovery afterwards. That is not desirable from point of view of the human race or individual humans.

"Potentially even more alarming than the climate change is the ongoing acidification of the oceans."

Both are caused by CO2 emissions. Phasing out coal over the next 40-50yrs would cut those emissions in half. However, just replacing the existing capacity of coal plants would require building two large nuclear reators (or 1000 windmills) per day. Such a massive undertaking may seem impossible until you condsider that we have accomplished the same feat with coal plants in less than my lifetime.

One thing I find odd about objections to nuclear is the argument that the waste is very hard to deal with. Yes, it is, but how much worse is it than the waste from coal, oil and gas? At least with nuclear you can dig a really deep hold and bury it until someone figures out a better solution. The by-products of fossil fuels go into the atmosphere and form dust/smog that gives people asthma etc. Aside from Chernobyl nuclear accidents seem to be far less severe thank say an oil spill too.

Amen. I trade stocks for a living, and some of the right-wing-radical types get to say a lot more about this than anyone should listen to. In fact, there's where I see the main bulk of anthropogenic CC deniers. Of course, this set rejects any change at all (unless it's a massive bailout for them off our backs), and really doesn't want to think much. Business as usual is their religion, because that's how they got rich and powerful, and don't want to have to learn some new way.

Most of them have big money invested in non renewable rescources -- some not very liquid (like a stock you can just sell in milliseconds) - they own things you can't sell quick and easy, especially if at that point no one else wants them much either, so they see a direct threat in this whole idea, and to them, it's a real threat and real money at stake. And for them, buying a credible scientist amounts to less than lunch money or a trip on the corprate jet. Sad, but.

So much so, that it costs less to buy off a decent (even Nobel prize level) scientist to say what they want said, right out in public. I have found it very entertaining to "follow the money" and it's actually kind of disgusting how cheap it is to buy a fake "controversy" where none exists among scientists not paid by these guys and/or coal/oil firms.

In fact, virtually 100% of all the deniers can be traced back to payment from one or more such entities. They've not bothered covering their tracks all that well, probably because they think the "greenies" don't include any forensic accountants. Wrong, but....

These guys are running scared, and putting money into people whose mouths say what they want said....
Look for yourselves -- it's not that hard to trace funding on some study. It's only a little harder to trace money given previously to get some one to say something.

If you want some guys easy to find out, and to see the very hotbed of this kind of scam, look at Investors Business Daily -- you'll want to puke of course, but they are more "out there" than any other source of this, and the least clever about who they quote and covering their tracks. Note, it's an expensive (and otherwise good info source) paper for investors -- many hundreds of bucks a year. I stopped my sub to them because the editorials on this and other issues made me want to barf too often.

Another way to get at the truth is things like NASA data as mentioned, and just looking at what was thought before this all became so politicized and conflictinated. There really wasn't much controversy then -- when it was "safe" to ignore by the big boys in carbon generation. And it should be obvious to most we are now, finally, doing things at a large enough scale to matter -- look at pictures of the earth from space at night...

There are nice long data series on ppm of CO2 in the air as measured in HI for example.
We've tripled it. If we do so again, warming won't matter -- we'll simply suffocate - we'll be at the level where humans can't get rid of their internally generated CO2 quick enough to not pass out. We could hope for some limited cooling from a volcano, or some sort of nuclear winter as far as warming goes, but that sets a pretty hard limit.

And lets face it -- the last time all this carbon was in the air -- we had the dinosaur climate (and our midwest was under water). There's no particular reason to disbelieve that if we put things back that way, we'd have the same climate as then, is there?

Humans can adapt and move, at some cost and travail. But how about trees? We're already seeing issues there and that's just one other form of life.

There are people, right here, in this discussion, who are arguing that the data does not support the conclusion that the climate is getting warmer overall. Then, in the same post, they will argue that the climate change, which they just said wasn't happening, isn't caused by humans.

You may have just met different people than me. I doubt we're going to agree on this since it's all pretty much anecdotal.

As for reversing the burden of proof... Well, on the one side you have people saying "we're releasing massi

When people move, often they vacate a house that someone else moves into. They aren't just fleeing disaster. The exchange of housing doesn't destroy value, disaster does. How bad could it be? Hansen and Sato have a draft paper out talking about exponentially growing mass loss from ice sheets. They are talking about several meters of sea level rise this century. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf [columbia.edu]

The natural effect is that a house on high ground gets repaired or replaced while the house on low ground doesn't get replaced.

All well and good, but what about land? Is there enough of it that's suitable for building new houses? That's presuming that the people who vacate the flooded cities are going to live somewhere, but perhaps you have other plans for them.

Hansen is a known political hack who has made a thirty year career out of global warming alarmism.

Ad hominem.

Please learn the difference between an exponential curve and a logistics curve.

It's the logistic curve, not logistics.

The logistics curve fits better because there is only so much ice to melt.

The fact that it may eventually peter out due to constraints at some future time (like lots of other processes from fork bombs to rabbit populations) has nothing to do with what it's doing now. He never claimed it would be exponential for ever and you know it. What a ridiculous strawman.

People don't realize that the Earth is been around for millions of years

Believe it or not, people actually do realize this. They also realize that for many of those millions of years the climate in areas we live in now was not nearly as habitable.

and just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it.

That's really a completely separate question. The first question is: "Is the climate changing?" If the answer to that is -yes-, then obviously we want to know what is it going to be like. If its going to be less habitable than it is now, then we want to know whether there are changes we can make to change the outcome to something we would like more.

Really, the question of what the cause is largely irrelevant except possibly as a subtext to what changes we might want to make if its heading in a direction we don't like.

Bottom line, if the earth enters another ice age, wipes most of us out, and we could have prevented it somehow but didn't because some idiot convinced us "It was a natural cycle"... that is not a "win". In other words, who exactly is going to be any happier getting wiped out by an ice age that occurs naturally vs one that we caused. Not me. Wiped out is wiped out. Arguing who's fault it is really isn't that important.

I completely agree with you. If we did not have climate models, guessing that an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correlates with rising temperature would be just a guess and would not show causation. It's a good thing we've had a climate model for over 100 years [wikipedia.org] that tells up to expect rising temperatures as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases.

Someone like me can reasonably propose that the previous 50 years of warming mean nothing since the next 50 will be cooling.

Since you mentioned that you reasonably propose this prediction, I must ask you to explain your reasoning. What makes you believe the next 50 years will be cooling? What are the mechanisms? Please explain your model - I am genuinely interested in hearing about it.

Although a lot of people don't seem to be too concerned with the idea of humanity being wiped out

No scenario for global warming has humanity being "wiped out". A "runaway greenhouse" like Venus is impossible - half the solar intensity, and far, far less carbon dioxide. It's like considering terrorists with a few bombs and box cutter knives an "existential threat".

What the fuck is this "Murphy's Law of Research"? I'll tell you what people do to support their assertions, they invent semi-familiar sounding axioms.

The whole point of AGM is that the climactic changes we're seeing are not part of a normal cycle. And what is it that you suggest, that we stop gathering data because the data will point towards a specific theory? That's the whole fucking point. You gather data, and the more data you gather, the clearer the picture becomes, for the theory or against it.

"just because we see a changing in a cycle doesn't mean we are causing it."

That's true.

But when you have a comprehensive mechanistic physical explanatory theory based on 50-100 years of lab-verified quantum mechanics, radiative transfer, backed up by decades of global observational evidence

AND

there are no other feasible explanations for the mystical "natural cycle" which somehow happens to replicate the features of greenhouse-induced global warming, and simultaneously supplant the known and exceptionally well proven basic physics, and there are no feasible even experimental programs to find this Mystical Natural Cycle But Definitely Not At All Any Fossil Fuel theory of planetary physics

Not really. If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once, but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.

First off "expected" has meaning in statistics, it's simply the weighted average.

Also you're using a rare event as an example. Six dice rolls with uniform distribution would only roll each side exactly once at approximately 1.5% chance (calculation below). Evenly distributed means even probabilities, not even outcomes.

In fact getting six different rolls in six throws would be evidence that it is not evenly distributed (that there might be an outside influence) but at such a low confidence level that it co

20yrs is considered long enough for 95% certainty of detecting a trend by the vast majority of climate scientists (IANACS). All of the past 34yrs have been warmer than the 20th century average. The observed trend over the last 30yrs is ~0.2 degC per decade, the trend itself is expected to accelerate since C02 concentrations are rising at a rate of ~2ppm/yr.

Greenland isn't melting. The icesheet is ablating. Just because its average temp during the summer is 3C above "normal" (whatever that is) does not mean that the average temp is not 20-30C below freezing.

"I live in the middle of England, where rising sea levels won't affect me directly".

Nonsense, warming of arctic waters is going to have a far more profound effect on all of Europe not to mention its agricultural sector. The instability is already decimating bird populations, particularly those whose habitats have shrunk as a result of human usurpation of their former ranges. I wouldn't want to be a farmer in the English country side these days. The unpredictability associated with a changing climate wil

The article makes an all too typical assumption. That is, that it assumes that the effect is roughly linear. The problem is that, like they've found in Antarctica, if there is enough melting, three things can happen. One, the sheet can start to float, and two, as more pieces break off due to this effect, more ground is exposed which acts like a heat sink. LAstly, as the ice melts, the land itself rises out of the ocean, exacerbating the issue.

Have you noticed that climate change conferences are always populated with research funded by billionaires

Have you ever been to a scientific conference, know anything about science funding, or even met a scientist?

The big two conferences in climate science (and geosciences in general) are the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. The research is mostly government funded: in the U.S., the big funding agencies are the National Science Foundation, NASA,